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Gingerbread Men (and tips for healthier holiday baking)

Almost Raw Gingerbread Men
There are certain foods that we don’t consider good for our bodies, which are actually very good for our souls. They are different for everybody, they are the foods that give us warm, nostalgic feelings. They are the foods whose aromas waft out from the kitchen and immediately make us feel safe and loved. Those are the feelings we all need to feel more often and are just as important as healthy food and clean air.

Almost Raw Gingerbread Men

The not-so-great part of this equation is that those same foods that give us all of the deep and delicious soul food are often the same foods that are full of sugar and refined carbs. What’s worse is that the more we learn about which foods we ‘should’ be eating (or when, let’s say your daughter obsessively researches the foods you should be eating based on your recent cancer diagnosis), we begin to feel guilty about these comforting soul food experiences, an emotion that cancels out all of the health benefits of the good stuff that you may have been feeling from those old familiar smells and tastes.

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‘Healthier’ Tiger Butter

Vegan Tiger Butter

I had you at ‘healthier’, didn’t I? Not the best word for describing any delicious food, but it’s an important part of this recipe. Yes, it’s still tiger butter in all of its smooth, sweet, nutty goodness, but you need to know we have made it without any of the refined sugar, dairy or aflatoxin-y peanut butter. Hooray…..!

Vegan Tiger Butter

It’s also really quick and easy to make, which might be a better sell for a recipe. The trickiest part can be finding the cocoa butter but if your local health food/gourmet shops don’t have any, there are many websites that will. Order some today, you want to make this!

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Frozen Coconut Chantilly Raspberry ‘Bombs’

Coconut Chantilly Frozen Raspberry Bombs

For several years I taught cooking classes part time at a cookware shop that also offered a series called ‘cookbook’ classes. For these they sold a newly released cookbook along with a menu to teach the class, chosen straight from the book. These were my favourite classes to teach because I found by the end of the class (along with the pre-class reading) I felt like I knew the cookbook author quite well.

Coconut Chantilly Frozen Raspberry Bombs

Think of Jamie Oliver and his bright, vibrant, energetic colours or Ina Garten and her organized but warm and inviting recipes; the food always matches the personalities.

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Chocolate Sunflower Seed Butter Balls

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What I really wanted to make for you this week was peanut butter balls. Either a version of the creamy, sweet ones from your childhood, or the rich and perfect ones from The French Laundry cookbook. That was my jumping-off idea, and although the recipe I have created is indulgent in many ways, I could include close to zero of the ingredients from these original recipes and still keep it crushing-cancer appropriate.

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There is still chocolate, which we can all applaud for. Dark chocolate with 70% cacao or higher is a great source of antioxidants and magnesium, and is low in the other stuff, which includes sugar, cocoa butter and possibly other additives. The higher the percentage of cocoa, the lower percentage of other ingredients, which means the darker the chocolate the better, in the health department.

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